I’ve mostly been using my own samples and drift presets and making 8-16 bar loops as idea starters to work on later. But I thought it would be fun to try to make a full track with different sections using just the random presets Move gave me. The first attempt was a bust but this second set of sounds went together pretty well.
I thought I could play back scenes and resample in realtime to record it but that didn’t work so I had to bring it into Live for export. My only cheat was upping the voice counts on the drift and wavetable tracks because I was getting some annoying voice stealing in a couple of spots.
This is the device I was thinking of - to be honest I don’t really use it all that much, the tagline just really stuck with me.
But it would be really nice to call e.g. up a drum rack randomised with one-shots and three random simplers. Afaik the Live browser isn’t in the LOM so don’t think it’s possible at this point to piggyback on the tags and lookalike functionality. But they’ve done a lot of work on this recently so I wouldn’t be surprised if it happened at some stage of the future.
Like that, I think controlled randomness is what would make it really useful, so that e.g. at least half of the drum rack is recognisable drum sounds, one of the samples is a loop, one is a bass sound, etc. Move does a decent job of this, although it seems like this is because the presets it uses have been manually categorised on the device - not sure if there’s any realistic prospect of carrying across tags or especially the similar sample functionality here, no matter where Ableton go with this on Live/Push.
And from there to also have the option to re-roll for a similar or totally random sound would be a cherry on top. I find the lookalike thing really useful, have gotten into chopping up material I like the vibe or texture of but don’t necessarily want to use in itself and taking that as a starting point for finding similar stuff in my own library.
pro #1 - on my unit, there’s 2x (edit: 3x) as many sets with my daughter singing & making silly voices, than my “serious” ones
pro #2 - Move comes with a usb-c cable, so I don’t need stupid dongles to connect to my MacBook Pro; it’s the only controller I have (out of 4 total) that does this
cons - none so far (well, 4 tracks is kinda poor, if I’m against the wall)
Interesting to see, that you have the APC 40 MK2 aswell. How would you compare Move in controller mode, when it comes to performative aspects like muting (drum-)pads & tracks, tweaking devices?
APC looks great, but I am also on the fence of re-buying Move and prefer to only make one purchase
Thanks!
